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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • Ah, I see. You’d want more diversity or substance to the dungeons, not length, or puzzles.

    Would you exchange it for less dungeons? I mean, smaller number of them, but each distinctive?

    And if so, how would you predict it’d change the dynamics of the game? Because now dungeons are pretty much “loot trips”, or locations required to solve some quests only. You know, "Oh, I need me some good weaponry, I’m gonna raid a few tombs and see where it’s going to get me.

    (Asking as a worldbuilder).



  • I honestly don’t get it.

    What we’re seeing in Bethesda’s design are more and more vibrant worlds - modern NPCs walk around, sit on whatever benches they see, react to day/night cycles, use the objects around them, comment on how you’re looking, what you’re wearing (or not), hear about your exploits. Not every NPC is ready to break to you his sad story worth a doctorate in psychology, but which one does?

    Even in games one may consider deep you will still find shopkeepers with same lines, or NPCs standing there, in the same spot, no matter whether it rains or not, ready to give you what is essentially a FedEx quest, no matter how many sentences they are going to express it with. You can break a fight in many deep games, and nobody around will mind it - attack a villager in Skyrim and guards and other denizens won’t take this shit kindly.

    Heck, the lore is vast, even since Daggerfall or Morrowind you had in-game books to find and read, stories to pursue, myths and legends to learn.

    The style, the tone, the predictability are things that definitely might use more attention, but I definitely wouldn’t call it a shallow design.







  • I don’t get that “shallow” part.

    In Bethesda’s worlds there’s always something going on, something new to discover, something new to learn… Providing you put an effort to pursue that. These games don’t force themselves upon the player, they leave helluva room for breathing, caring about whatever small goals you may set upon yourself, but that’s not “bad”, isn’t it?